Copy of narrowing the gap

This resource has been designed to meet a cry for help from secondary schools as they combat a growing challenge of  widening attainment gaps between some groups of students, most notably Pupil Premium, and other students.

Our approach to building better learners, explained in this resource, is commonly applied in primary schools as a whole school strategy. This whole school approach has proved to be far more difficult to achieve in secondary schools where teachers meet students much less frequently and for much less time.

The resource aims to narrow the achievement gap, and avoid students falling further behind, by enabling teachers with responsibility for assisting their target group of students to;

• analyse students’ current growth in learning power behaviours
• introduce students to their learning behaviours
• adapt their teaching to better accommodate growth in learning behaviours
• monitor and evaluate their own practise and the subsequent growth in students learning behaviours

The approach to learning advocated here comes from the vision of twenty-first century education and the new sciences of learning that underpin it. It starts from first principles; that we now know an individual’s ability isn’t fixed; that the brain is like a muscle; that its intelligence grows with exercise. Selling this idea to learners brings, in itself, far more enthusiasm for engaging with the potential delights of learning, helping students to become more independent, more reflective, and better able to plan and evaluate their own learning. This, as John Hattie’s research has shown, is a better way of boosting students’ attainment than more drilling in the subject-matter.

The great strength of this approach is that there is already a wealth of tried and tested strategies that teachers can introduce immediately to begin to transform the learning experience of their students, and give them a language with which to think about the process of learning. You can boost the development of students’ confidence, capacity and appetite for learning itself.

This resource offers teachers;

• the basic tools and techniques of an approach that aims to raise students’ awareness of how they can begin to take control of their learning behaviours.
• ways of looking at students’ behaviour in order to understand which approaches might be needed
• a way of estimating the students’ growth in learning behaviours and how to move forward.

Section structure…

Each section deals with a key aspect of understanding, introducing and testing the approach:

• • Section 1 Why learning power makes a difference...introduces you to the meaning and attributes of learning power
  • Section  2 Start with the end in mind…aims to give you an idea of the sort of change in practice you’re aiming for
  • Section  3 Exploring the gap you wish to narrow…offers serious considerations concerning the gap in learning you are trying to close
  • Section  4 Changing expectations...offers practical ideas about how your practice is likely to change to start things off
  • Section  5 Introducing learning is learnable...makes suggestions for how to first introduce the approach to your students
  • Section  6 Planning your teaching...introduces practical ways of planning your teaching
  • Section  7 Tools and resource banks…gives you the most useful tools to enable you to take the approach more widely
  • Section  8 What’s working: what next? encourages you to find out what and how what you are doing is working

High road…doing it seriously with before and after testing see section 3

the lower road….Stuff on what to tackle when and how

All this may be worthwhile but no one said it would be easy…worthwhile things rarely are…and that’s why you need to keep your eye on your students’ ‘dispositional’ progress. Seeing their dispositions change will be your reward.

In the early days of introducing learning power the typical progress of a teacher followed 3 stages ( as shown opposite). We think this is worth sharing with you in the hope that you can grasp the teaching ideas more rapidly.

• Stage 1 Starting out
  • You signal the learning behaviour to be used in a lesson, but no more
• Stage 2 Improving
  • You signal and reflect on the learning behaviour and link to content used in a lesson
• Stage 3 Nearly there
  • You signal the behaviour, link it to a suitable activity , behaviour directs the learning and students reflect on its use.

Find out more on this progression in section xxxxxx